


The Lieutenant

by Mrsomnom



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Character Death, Eveiffel, Evil!Eiffel, Groundhog Day, Minkowski Suffers, SI-5!Eiffel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 07:25:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14515359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mrsomnom/pseuds/Mrsomnom
Summary: This is the story of how Lieutenant Renée Minkowski became an agent of the SI-5.





	The Lieutenant

**Author's Note:**

> I got called the fuck out in the discord for some shit I wrote almost a year ago, and was subsequently asked to post it to AO3. So this is the story of some pain on the side of Minkowski in the Eveiffelverse. I had a lot of fun with this, but really I wrote it out very quickly and it's probably not fantastic, but it's more coherent than a bunch of discord messages.

_         Major Douglas Eiffel. _

The words rang in Minkowski’s head all morning. Eiffel had  _ betrayed  _ them. No, it’s not betrayal if he was never on their side in the first place.

She simply could not wrap her head around the fact that Eiffel, bumbling, incompetent, compassionate,  _ harmless _ Eiffel had been lying the whole time they were in space. And she thought Hilbert was the sleeper agent. But he was never in control. Even he didn’t know that.

The day of their mutiny, things already were going wrong. Kepler and Jacobi and Maxwell knew their plan already, Jacobi never walked into her and Hilbert’s trap, and he intercepted Eiffel and Lovelace before they could incapacitate Maxwell. Eiffel had taken him one-on-one, and disarmed him. Yet before Lovelace’s shock could even set in as she wondered where he learned to fight like that, like an SI-5 agent, he stood and faced her. He said, seemingly to nobody,  _ “I told you I could beat you, Daniel.”  _ And he let Jacobi stand up. Lovelace’s mind was racing too quickly that she barely registered the taunt retorted by  _ Daniel.  _ When Eiffel pointed the gun he took from Jacobi during their “fight” at her, her instincts took over, and she lunged for him, whoever the man standing in Officer Eiffel’s place was. 

She was taken out by Maxwell before she could even reach him.

And Hera, poor Hera, there was nothing she could do. She was crying hysterically that Eiffel betrayed them and that they weren’t safe and couldn’t trust him. Minkowski wishes she listened, but she and Hilbert assumed that if the plan had gone sideways that Maxwell was using Hera to try and turn them against each other. They found Eiffel and they  _ trusted him _ still with Hera telling them not to, right as he was leading them into a trap. Right when Minkowski started getting suspicious about Eiffel’s behavior and Lovelace being taken out and why he seemed to have a “backup” plan for them  _ and the gun in his waistband, _ it was too late, and they pulled their guns at the same moment. She couldn’t bring herself to shoot Eiffel, and she paid the price as shots rang from Major Eiffel’s gun.

And yet she woke up. It was the day of the mutiny again.

She returned to the planning session, hoped it was a nightmare, hoped she wasn’t having another Wednesday. But she saw it, as Eiffel pushed and prodded the plan to work  _ perfectly _ for him. Of course he pretended to be a pacifist, team  _ what’s-wrong-with-handcuffs _ just didn’t want his  _ true  _ allies to die.

She volunteered to go with him to Maxwell. She could stop him. When she pulled her weapon on him outside Maxwell’s room, Eiffel looked at her confusedly. For a moment, she thought, maybe it was just a dream. Why would Doug ever want to hurt her? She was about to put the gun down and chalk it up to stress when Eiffel glanced over her shoulder as Jacobi came down the hall and hit her over the head with a canister of halothane gas.

On the third day, she tried to tell Hera what happened. Hera wouldn’t believe her, of course, because Eiffel was their friend and could never hurt a fly, and Renée was probably going crazy from the stress and the reveal that everyone thinks she’s dead. Now Hera didn’t trust her judgment, since she was being so irrational, so she told Hilbert, Lovelace, and Eiffel so the four of them could continue to plan without Minkowski. 

If the day hadn’t restarted, they would’ve found Renée’s body in the secret room, and Eiffel colluding with his old friends on the Urania.

The next time, she tried Lovelace, with the same results. Except this time, Lovelace didn’t reveal Minkowski’s ‘insanity’ to the team, and simply put her on lockdown for instability. She heard only the distant screaming as things once again went sideways.

Hilbert listened the next day. The two of them tried to incapacitate Eiffel before the planning session. It went well until Jacobi walked in.

On the sixth day, she began to take a more direct approach, but could never pull the trigger. Even when she knocked him unconscious, she couldn’t do it when he was out cold. How could she believe he was evil then? So on the seventh day she left him awake, pulled her gun, and hoped he would show his true face and Renée would know her friend wasn’t in there. Again, she got that confused, hurt, and scared look of Comms Officer Doug Eiffel, and lowered her weapon with tears in her eyes. If only she knew of the emergency comms device in his pocket. The facade only breaks when Kepler finds them.

Minkowski tried  _ everything. _ She kept desperately trying to convince the others, resorted to bargaining, even tried to trick Hera into killing Eiffel on accident.

On day thirteen, she begged to him. She says she knows who he is but he’s still her friend. He just shot her.

On day nineteen, she blew up the whole station; Eiffel, Kepler, herself.

It’s day twenty-two now, and she’s tired. She’s desperate, and wants to stop reliving her best friend betraying her and killing her and all her friends. She does the last thing she can think of, and turns herself in to Kepler. She hands in her gun and confesses that she, Hilbert, Lovelace, and Hera were planning a mutiny. She prays that they’ll spare them, but she knows she’ll likely die, or be locked up and listen to her friends try and fail to beat Kepler, and then she’ll wake up again that morning.

But that’s not what happens. Instead of killing her, or locking her away, Kepler hands Renée her gun back.

“You did the right thing, and you showed your loyalty. A crew member mutineed and you took appropriate actions to thwart it by reporting to your commanding officer. Now, you also have our best window into this operation they’re planning. Mutineers must be punished. You know what to do.”

She doesn’t know what to laugh at internally, Kepler’s assumption that she doesn’t know that Eiffel works for them, or the assumption that’s she’s known what to do at any point in this godforsaken mission.

She goes to the planning session anyway. Everything goes the way it did that first day. Eiffel’s plan will go smoothly with Lovelace and Jacobi, and now Minkowski’s alone with Hilbert in engineering, and she knows Jacobi won’t come their way. Maybe this is what she should’ve done the first time Hilbert mutineed.

She pulls her gun on him.

\--

Renée thinks, years later, that her breaking point was the first time Eiffel looked her in the eyes with a cold, hard glare that could never belong to Doug Eiffel. That’s the moment she went  _ fuck it. _ Fuck whatever happens to her. She let herself get killed, she killed Eiffel, she did so much so many times. But it took her a while to actually act on it. It was truly letting go that broke the cycle.

By the time she returned to Kepler and Eiffel, she had the barest whisper of anger left. She wanted to kill Eiffel. She wanted to pull her gun. She wanted to spit in his face as he gave her the bone-chilling grin of a well trained actor and SI-5 agent. Instead, she responded as he praised her for her good work. She called him  _ Major, _ as she knew she should, as he called her  _ Lieutenant. _

Now, she feels very little for him. Now she’s cold, after she woke up to find that it was tomorrow and the same blood was still on her hands. And now she calls Doug Colonel, and he calls Renée Lt. Major.

And that’s the story of how Lieutenant Renée Minkowski became a member of the SI-5.


End file.
